'Attack’ on board of elections website likely not malicious

Vote count was never in jeopardy during Election Night crash of public website.

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By Josh Sweigart, Staff Writer Updated 11:38 AM Thursday, May 6, 2010

HAMILTON — When the Butler County Board of Elections website crashed Election Night, May 4, and county officials learned it was an outside program overwhelming the system, elections officials feared the worst.

But despite initially calling it an “attack” and a deliberate hack, county officials now said it’s unclear whether it was intentional.

“It certainly looked suspicious,” county Information Technology Director Greg Sullivan said, “but we’re not convinced it’s malicious.”

Sullivan said his staff is still analyzing the issue and will present a report today to elections officials. They will then decide whether to call in the sheriff’s office for a criminal investigation.

What caused the problem, Sullivan said, was a computer somewhere locally that was trying to download the election results two to three times per second. This overwhelmed the system, causing the site to crash.

This only affected the results displayed to the public, elections officials stressed. They said the actual vote count was untouched and experienced no problems.

“The two networks (the website and vote count) are not connected physically at all,” Sullivan said. “We felt like the tabulation was going as expected, and very well.”

“No vote was ever in jeopardy, the vote tabulation and all that is not connected to the Internet, by law,” said Kevin Kidder, spokesman with the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office. “The only thing that was affected was their website,” Kidder said. “We have every confidence that the (Butler County) board will handle that and take care of it.”

Sullivan said the county knows that the hundreds of clicks that brought down their servers came from the same Internet IP address, but little else is known. They’re not sure if that computer had a glitch, or if their computer had a problem interacting with it.

“We have not experienced this in the past,” Sullivan said. “(But) we’re looking at the entire process. Certainly if there’s something that is needed to adjust in our website or our code, we will do that.”

And he said the county will work to prevent this from happening again.

“We need to determine how to proactively manage a similar situation in the next election,” Sullivan said.

Butler County has a history of election-night technical issues. In the 2008 primary, an election machine glitch almost caused more than 200 votes to go uncounted, leading to a pending lawsuit with the manufacturer. This and other anxieties about voting machines caused increased requests for paper ballots in that year’s general election, pushing the vote count into the next day.

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